Rob Chambers of St Ivo’s School and Geobytes has published an awesome directory of resources to support Geography teaching in the UK. It’s a big (5mb) download, yet the quality of the Directory makes it an essential acquisition.

New developments to the leading online mapping applications are widely reported today. Geography teachers should be aware that some of these features are going to be really useful for writing up fieldwork notes and coursework projects, especially as some form of GIS experience is required by the new Key Stage Three proposals.

Mapperz highlights the new version of Live Local, which is an essential resource for teachers who work in an area deprived of acceptable Google Earth imagery. One of the best new features is the opportunity to subscribe to collections via RSS. At some stage I’m going to repost my own Live Local Collections with the feed link in case anyone would be interested.

Ogle Earth has compared the relative merits of the drawing tools in Live Local and Google Maps in a useful article. I’ve pleased that a number of my students seem to have enhanced their GCSE projects this year with quite good annotation of map and photo data.

Finally, Google Earth Blog is one of several blogs to comment on the new My Maps feature of Google Maps. What’s really exciting is that you can create a My Map and then see the results in Google Earth.

Despite being just a couple of days old, Google Earth Library looks set to become an essential blog for news of content rather than placemarks. The editor plans on addidng 70 to 100 posts per week until he has worked through his backlog which means that I won’t be subscribing to the feed just yet!

It’s a collaborative blog with several really useful files already posted. I’m particularly looking forward to the development of the education category and wish topomat all the best in his endeavours!

News of a great new Google Earth layer that is UK-specific (for a refreshing change!)

Barry Hunter of the extremely useful Nearby.org.uk website has created a superlayer that displays images from the Geograph project (Creative Commons photographs that will eventually represent every square kilometer of the UK.)

I have written up a new Google Earth teaching idea that combines a study of the modern classic Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, with an investigation of Svalbard, one of the settings for the book. The book is published in the USA as The Golden Compass.